I'd like to comment on topics that I
think should regularly be on the front pages but are not - and in many
crucial cases are scarcely mentioned at all or are presented in ways that
seem to me deceptive because they're framed almost reflexively in terms of
doctrines of the powerful.
In these comments I'll focus primarily on the United States for several
reasons: One, it's the most important country in terms of its power and
influence. Second, it's the most advanced - not in its inherent character,
but in the sense that because of its power, other societies tend to move in
that direction. The third reason is just that I know it better. But I think
what I say generalizes much more widely - at least to my knowledge,
obviously there are some variations. So I'll be concerned then with
tendencies in American society and what they portend for the world, given
American power.

American power is diminishing, as it
has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it's still incomparable. And
it's dangerous. Obama's remarkable global terror campaign and the limited,
pathetic reaction to it in the West is one shocking example. And it is a
campaign of international terrorism - by far the most extreme in the world.
Those who harbor any doubts on that should read the report issued by
Stanford University and New York University, and actually I'll return to
even more serious examples than international terrorism.

"Really
Existing Capitalist Democracy" ( RECD )

According to received doctrine, we
live in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite
some flaws. There's been an interesting debate over the years about the
relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even
compatible? I won't be pursuing this because I'd like to discuss a different
system - what we could call the "Really Existing Capitalist Democracy", RECD
for short, pronounced "wrecked" by accident. To begin with, how does RECD
compare with democracy? Well that depends on what we mean by "democracy".
There are several versions of this. One, there is a kind of received
version. It's soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety, patriotic speeches,
what children are taught in school, and so on. In the U.S. version, it's
government "of, by and for the people". And it's quite easy to compare that
with RECD.

In the United States, one of the main
topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy
and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the
United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls,
and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are
interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field,
it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the
wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're
effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you
get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is
maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e.
they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy;
it's plutocracy.

Policy Throughout
Is Almost the Opposite of Public Opinion

Inquiries of this kind turn out to be
dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of
the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding
for them, so we won't have to worry about them in the future. These characteristics of RECD show up
all the time. So the major domestic issue in the United States for the
public is jobs. Polls show that very clearly. For the very wealthy and the
financial institutions, the major issue is the deficit. Well, what about
policy? There's now a sequester in the United States, a sharp cutback in
funds. Is that because of jobs or is it because of the deficit? Well, the
deficit.

Europe, incidentally, is much worse -
so outlandish that even The Wall Street Journal has been appalled by the
disappearance of democracy in Europe. A couple of weeks ago it had an
article which concluded that "the French, the Spanish, the Irish, the Dutch,
Portuguese, Greeks, Slovenians, Slovakians and Cypriots have to varying
degrees voted against the currency bloc's economic model since the crisis
began three years ago. Yet economic policies have changed little in response
to one electoral defeat after another. The left has replaced the right; the
right has ousted the left. Even the center-right trounced Communists (in
Cyprus) - but the economic policies have essentially remained the same:
governments will continue to cut spending and raise taxes." It doesn't
matter what people think and "national governments must follow
macro-economic directives set by the European Commission". Elections are
close to meaningless, very much as in Third World countries that are ruled
by the international financial institutions. That's what Europe has chosen
to become. It doesn't have to.

Returning to the United States, where
the situation is not quite that bad, there's the same disparity between
public opinion and policy on a very wide range of issues. Take for example
the issue of minimum wage. The one view is that the minimum wage ought to be
indexed to the cost of living and high enough to prevent falling below the
poverty line. Eighty percent of the public support that and forty percent of
the wealthy. What's the minimum wage? Going down, way below these levels.
It's the same with laws that facilitate union activity: strongly supported
by the public; opposed by the very wealthy - disappearing. The same is true
on national healthcare. The U.S., as you may know, has a health system which
is an international scandal, it has twice the per capita costs of other OECD
countries and relatively poor outcomes. The only privatized, pretty much
unregulated system. The public doesn't like it. They've been calling for
national healthcare, public options, for years, but the financial
institutions think it's fine, so it stays: stasis. In fact, if the United
States had a healthcare system like comparable countries there wouldn't be
any deficit. The famous deficit would be erased, which doesn't matter that
much anyway.

One of the most interesting cases has
to do with taxes. For 35 years there have been polls on 'what do you think
taxes ought to be?' Large majorities have held that the corporations and the
wealthy should pay higher taxes. They've steadily been going down through
this period.
On and on, the policy throughout is almost the opposite of public opinion,
which is a typical property of RECD.

The U.S. One-Party
State

In the past, the United States has
sometimes, kind of sardonically, been described as a one-party state: the
business party with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. That's no
longer true. It's still a one-party state, the business party. But it only
has one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called
Democrats. There are virtually no moderate Republicans in what's called the
Republican Party and virtually no liberal Democrats in what's called the
Democratic Party. It's basically a party of what would be moderate
Republicans and similarly, Richard Nixon would be way at the left of the
political spectrum today. Eisenhower would be in outer space.

There is still something called the
Republican Party, but it long ago abandoned any pretense of being a normal
parliamentary party. It's in lock-step service to the very rich and the
corporate sector and has a catechism that everyone has to chant in unison,
kind of like the old Communist Party. The distinguished conservative
commentator, one of the most respected - Norman Ornstein - describes today's
Republican Party as, in his words, "a radical insurgency - ideologically
extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, dismissive of its political
opposition" - a serious danger to the society, as he points out.

In short, Really Existing Capitalist
Democracy is very remote from the soaring rhetoric about democracy. But
there is another version of democracy. Actually it's the standard doctrine
of progressive, contemporary democratic theory. So I'll give some
illustrative quotes from leading figures - incidentally not figures on the
right. These are all good Woodrow Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberals, mainstream
ones in fact. So according to this version of democracy, "the public are
ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. They have to be put in their place.
Decisions must be in the hands of an intelligent minority of responsible
men, who have to be protected from the trampling and roar of the bewildered
herd".

The herd has a function, as it's called. They're supposed to lend
their weight every few years, to a choice among the responsible men. But
apart from that, their function is to be "spectators, not participants in
action" - and it's for their own good. Because as the founder of liberal
political science pointed out, we should not succumb to “democratic
dogmatisms about people being the best judges of their own interest".
They're not. We're the best judges, so it would be irresponsible to let them
make choices just as it would be irresponsible to let a three-year-old run
into the street.

Attitudes and opinions therefore have to be controlled for
the benefit of those you are controlling. It's necessary to "regiment their
minds". It's necessary also to discipline the institutions responsible for
the "indoctrination of the young." All quotes, incidentally. And if we can
do this, we might be able to get back to the good old days when “Truman had
been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small
number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers." This is all from icons of the
liberal establishment, the leading progressive democratic theorists. Some of
you may recognize some of the quotes.

The “Rabble” Has
Been Terrifying for Hundreds of Years

The roots of these
attitudes go back quite far. They go back to the first stirrings of modern
democracy. The first were in England in the 17th Century. As you know, later
in the United States. And they persist in fundamental ways. The first
democratic revolution was England in the 1640s. There was a civil war
between king and parliament. But the gentry, the people who called
themselves "the men of best quality", were appalled by the rising popular
forces that were beginning to appear on the public arena. They didn't want
to support either king or parliament. Quote their pamphlets, they didn't
want to be ruled by "knights and gentlemen, who do but oppress us, but we
want to be governed by countrymen like ourselves, who know the people's
sores". That's a pretty terrifying sight. Now the rabble has been a pretty
terrifying sight ever since.

Actually it was long before. It remained so a
century after the British democratic revolution. The founders of the
American republic had pretty much the same view about the rabble. So they
determined that "power must be in the hands of the wealth of the nation, the
more responsible set of men. Those who have sympathy for property owners and
their rights", and of course for slave owners at the time. In general, men
who understand that a fundamental task of government is “to protect the
minority of the opulent from the majority". Those are quotes from James
Madison, the main framer - this was in the Constitutional Convention, which
is much more revealing than the Federalist Papers which people read. The
Federalist Papers were basically a propaganda effort to try to get the
public to go along with the system. But the debates in the Constitutional
Convention are much more revealing. And in fact the constitutional system
was created on that basis. I don't have time to go through it, but it
basically adhered to the principle which was enunciated simply by John Jay,
the president of the ­ Continental Congress, then first Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, and as he put it, "those who own the country ought to govern
it". That's the primary doctrine of RECD to the present.

There've been many
popular struggles since - and they've won many victories. The masters,
however, do not relent. The more freedom is won, the more intense are the
efforts to redirect the society to a proper course. And the 20th Century
progressive democratic theory that I've just sampled is not very different
from the RECD that has been achieved, apart from the question of: Which
responsible men should rule? Should it be bankers or intellectual elites? Or
for that matter should it be the Central Committee in a different version of
similar doctrines?

Well, another important
feature of RECD is that the public must be kept in the dark about what is
happening to them. The "herd" must remain "bewildered". The reasons were
explained lucidly by the professor of the science of government at Harvard -
that's the official name - another respected liberal figure, Samuel
Huntington. As he pointed out, "power remains strong when it remains in the
dark. Exposed to sunlight, it begins to evaporate".

Bradley Manning is
facing a life in prison for failure to comprehend this scientific principle.
Now Edward Snowden as well. And it works pretty well. If you take a look at
polls, it reveals how well it works. So for example, recent polls pretty
consistently reveal that Republicans are preferred to Democrats on most
issues and crucially on the issues in which the public opposes the policies
of the Republicans and favors the policies of the Democrats. One striking
example of this is that majorities say that they favor the Republicans on
tax policy, while the same majorities oppose those policies. This runs
across the board. This is even true of the far right, the Tea Party types.
This goes along with an astonishing level of contempt for government.
Favorable opinions about Congress are literally in the single digits. The
rest of the government as well. It's all declining sharply.

Results such as these,
which are pretty consistent, illustrate demoralization of the public of a
kind that's unusual, although there are examples - the late Weimar Republic
comes to mind. The tasks of ensuring that the rabble keep to their function
as bewildered spectators, takes many forms. The simplest form is simply to
restrict entry into the political system. Iran just had an election, as you
know. And it was rightly criticized on the grounds that even to participate,
you had to be vetted by the guardian council of clerics. In the United
States, you don't have to be vetted by clerics, but rather you have to be
vetted by concentrations of private capital. Unless you pass their filter,
you don't enter the political system - with very rare exceptions.

Deluding the Masses

There are many
mechanisms, too familiar to review, but that's not safe enough either. There
are major institutions that are specifically dedicated to undermining
authentic democracy. One of them is called the public relations industry. A
huge industry, it was in fact developed on the principle that it's necessary
to regiment the minds of men, much as an army regiments its soldiers - I was
actually quoting from one of its leading figures before.

The role of the PR industry in elections is explicitly to undermine the
school-child version of democracy. What you learn in school is that
democracies are based on informed voters making rational decisions. All you
have to do is take a look at an electoral campaign run by the PR industry
and see that the purpose is to create uninformed voters who will make
irrational decisions. For the PR industry that's a very easy transition from
their primary function. Their primary function is commercial advertising.
Commercial advertising is designed to undermine markets. If you took an
economics course you learned that markets are based on informed consumers
making rational choices. If you turn on the TV set, you see that ads are
designed to create irrational, uninformed consumers making irrational
choices. The whole purpose is to undermine markets in the technical sense.

They're well aware of
it, incidentally. So for example, after Obama's election in 2008, a couple
of months later the advertising industry had its annual conference. Every
year they award a prize for the best marketing campaign of the year. That
year they awarded it to Obama. He beat out Apple Computer, did an even
better job of deluding the public - or his PR agents did. If you want to
hear some of it, turn on the television today and listen to the soaring
rhetoric at the G-8 Summit in Belfast. It's standard.

There was interesting
commentary on this in the business press, primarily The London Financial
Times, which had a long article, interviewing executives about what they
thought about the election. And they were quite euphoric about this. They
said this gives them a new model for how to delude the public. The Obama
model could replace the Reagan model, which worked pretty well for a while.

Turning to the economy,
the core of the economy today is financial institutions. They've vastly
expanded since the 1970s, along with a parallel development - accelerated
shift of production abroad. There have also been critical changes in the
character of financial institutions. If you go back to the
1960s, banks were banks. If you had some money, you put it in the bank to
lend it to somebody to buy a house or start a business, or whatever.

Now
that's a very marginal aspect of financial institutions today. They're
mostly devoted to intricate, exotic manipulations with markets. And they're
huge. In the United States, financial institutions, big banks mostly, had
40% of corporate profit in 2007. That was on the eve of the financial
crisis, for which they were largely responsible. After the crisis, a number
of professional economists - Nobel laureate Robert Solow, Harvard's Benjamin
Friedman - wrote articles in which they pointed out that economists haven't
done much study of the impact of the financial institutions on the economy.
Which is kind of remarkable, considering its scale. But after the crisis
they took a look and they both concluded that probably the impact of the
financial institutions on the economy is negative.

Actually there are some
who are much more outspoken than that. The most respected financial
correspondent in the English-speaking world is Martin Wolf of the Financial
Times. He writes that the "out-of-control financial sector is eating out the
modern market economy from the inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp
eats out the host in which it has been laid". By "the market economy" he
means the productive economy.

There's a recent issue
of the main business weekly, Bloomberg Business Week, which reported a study
of the IMF that found that the largest banks make no profit. What they earn,
according to the IMF analysis, traces to the government insurance policy,
the so-called too-big-to-fail policy. There is a widely publicized bailout,
but that's the least of it. There's a whole series of other devices by which
the government insurance policy aids the big banks: cheap credit and many
other things. And according to the IMF at least, that's the totality of
their profit. The editors of the journal say this is crucial to
understanding why the big banks present such a threat to the global economy
- and to the people of the country, of course.

After the crash, there was the first serious attention by professional
economists to what's called systemic risk. They knew it existed but it
wasn't much a topic of investigation. 'Systemic risk' means the risk that if
a transaction fails, the whole system may collapse. That's what's called an
externality in economic theory. It's a footnote. And it’s one of the
fundamental flaws of market systems, a well-known, inherent flaw, is
externalities. Every transaction has impacts on others which just aren't
taken into account in a market transaction. Systemic risk is a big one. And
there are much more serious illustrations than that. I'll come back to it.

What about the
productive economy under RECD? Here there's a mantra too. The mantra is
based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice in a free market.
There are agreements established called free-trade agreements, which are
based on the mantra. That's all mythology.

The reality is that
there is massive state intervention in the productive economy and the
free-trade agreements are anything but free-trade agreements. That should be
obvious. Just to take one example: The information technology (IT)
revolution, which is driving the economy, that was based on decades of work
in effectively the state sector - hard, costly, creative work substantially
in the state sector, no consumer choice at all, there was entrepreneurial
initiative but it was largely limited to getting government grants or
bailouts or procurement. Except by some economists, that's underestimated
but a very significant factor in corporate profit. If you can't sell
something, hand it over the government. They'll buy it.

After a long period - decades in fact - of hard, creative work, the primary
research and development, the results are handed over to private enterprise
for commercialization and profit. That's Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so
on. It's not quite that simple of course. But that’s a core part of the
picture. The system goes way back to the origins of industrial economies,
but it's dramatically true since WWII that this ought to be the core of the
study of the productive economy.

Another central aspect
of RECD is concentration of capital. In just the past 20 years in the United
States, the share of profits of the two hundred largest enterprises has very
sharply risen, probably the impact of the Internet, it seems. These
tendencies towards oligopoly also undermine the mantra, of course.
Interesting topics but I won't pursue them any further.

Pretty Grim
Prospects Under RECD

Instead, I'd like to
turn to another question. What are the prospects for the future under RECD?
There's an answer. They're pretty grim. It's no secret that there are a
number of dark shadows that hover over every topic that we discuss and there
are two that are particularly ominous, so I'll keep to those, though there
are others. One is environmental catastrophe. The other is nuclear war. Both
of which of course threaten the prospects for decent survival and not in the
remote future.

I won't say very much
about the first, environmental catastrophe. That should be obvious.
Certainly the scale of the danger should be obvious to anyone with eyes
open, anyone who is literate, particularly those who read scientific
journals. Every issue of a technical journal virtually has more dire
warnings than the last one.

There are various
reactions to this around the world. There are some who seek to act
decisively to prevent possible catastrophe. At the other extreme, major
efforts are underway to accelerate the danger. Leading the effort to
intensify the likely disaster is the richest and most powerful country in
world history, with incomparable advantages and the most prominent example
of RECD - the one that others are striving towards.

Leading the efforts to
preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent
life, are the so-called "primitive" societies: First Nations in Canada,
Aboriginal societies in Australia, tribal societies and others like them.
The countries that have large and influential indigenous populations are
well in the lead in the effort to "defend the Earth". That's their phrase.
The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or
extreme marginalization are racing forward enthusiastically towards
destruction. This is one of the major features of contemporary history. One
of those things that ought to be on front pages.

So take Ecuador, which has
a large indigenous population. It's seeking aid from the rich countries to
allow it to keep its substantial hydrocarbon reserves underground, which is
where they ought to be. Now meanwhile, the U.S. and Canada are
enthusiastically seeking to burn every drop of fossil fuel, including the
most dangerous kind - Canadian tar sands - and to do so as quickly and fully
as possible - without a side glance on what the world might look like after
this extravagant commitment to self-destruction. Actually, every issue of
the daily papers suffices to illustrate this lunacy. And lunacy is the right
word for it. It's exactly the opposite of what rationality would demand,
unless it's the skewed rationality of RECD.

Well, there have been
massive corporate campaigns to implant and safeguard the lunacy. But despite
them, there's still a real problem in American society. The public is still
too committed to scientific rationality. One of the many divergences between
policy and opinion is that the American public is close to the global norm
in concern about the environment and calling for actions to prevent the
catastrophe and that's a pretty high level.

Meanwhile, bipartisan policy is
dedicated to 'bringing it on', in a phrase that George W. Bush made famous
in the case of Iraq. Fortunately, the corporate sector is riding to the
rescue to deal with this problem. There is a corporate funded organization -
the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It designs legislation for
states. No need to comment on what kind of legislation. They've got a lot of
clout and money behind them. So the programs tend to get instituted. Right
now they're instituting a new program to try to overcome the excessive
rationality of the public. It's a program of instruction for K-12
(kindergarten to 12th grade in schools).

Its publicity says that the idea is
to improve critical faculties - I'd certainly be in favor of that - by
balanced teaching. 'Balanced teaching' means that if a sixth grade class
learned something about what's happening to the climate, they have to be
presented with material on climate change denial so that they have balanced
teaching and can develop their critical faculties. Maybe that'll help
overcome the failure of massive corporate propaganda campaigns to make the
population ignorant and irrational enough to safeguard short-term profit for
the rich. It’s pointedly the goal and several states have already accepted
it.

Well, it's worth
remembering, without pursuing it that these are deep-seated institutional
properties of RECD. They're not easy to uproot. All of this is apart from
the institutional necessity to maximize short-term profit while ignoring an
externality that's vastly more serious even than systemic risk. For systemic
risk, the market failure - the culprits - can run to the powerful nanny
state that they foster with cap in hand and they'll be bailed out, as we've
just observed again and will in the future. In the case of destruction of
the environment, the conditions for decent existence, there's no guardian
angel around - nobody to run to with cap in hand. For that reason alone, the
prospects for decent survival under RECD are quite dim.

Security Does Not
Have a High Priority

Let's turn to the other
shadow: nuclear war. It's a threat that's been with us for 70 years. It
still is. In some ways it's growing. One of the reasons for it is that under
RECD, the rights and needs of the general population are a minor matter.
That extends to security. There is another prevailing mantra, particularly
in the academic professions, claiming that governments seek to protect
national security. Anyone who has studied international relations theory has
heard that. That's mostly mythology. The governments seek to extend power
and domination and to benefit their primary domestic constituencies - in the
U.S., primarily the corporate sector. The consequence is that security does
not have a high priority. We see that all the time. Right now in fact.

Take
say Obama's operation to murder Osama Bin Laden, prime suspect for the 9/11
attack. Obama made an important speech on national security last May 23rd.
It was widely covered. There was one crucial paragraph in the speech that
was ignored in the coverage. Obama hailed the operation, took pride in it -
an operation which incidentally is another step at dismantling the
foundations of Anglo-American law, back to the Magna Carta, namely the
presumption of innocence. But that's by now so familiar, it's not even
necessary to talk about it. But there's more to it. Obama did hail the
operation but he added to it that it "cannot be the norm". The reason is
that "the risks were immense". The Navy SEALs who carried out the murder
might have been embroiled in an extended firefight, but even though by luck
that didn't happen, "the cost to our relationship with Pakistan - and the
backlash of the Pakistani public over the encroachment on their territory",
the aggression in other words, "was so severe that we're just now beginning
to rebuild this important partnership".

It's more than that.
Let's add a couple of details. The SEALswere under orders to fight their way
out if they were apprehended. They would not have been left to their fate if
they had been, in Obama's words, been "embroiled in an extended firefight".
The full force of the U.S. military would have been employed to extricate
them. Pakistan has a powerful military. It's well-trained, highly protective
of state sovereignty. Of course, it has nuclear weapons. And leading
Pakistani specialists on nuclear policy and issues are quite concerned by
the exposure of the nuclear weapons system to jihadi elements. It could have
escalated to a nuclear war.

And in fact it came pretty close. While the SEALs were still inside the Bin Laden compound, the Pakistani chief of staff,
General Kayani, was informed of the invasion and he ordered his staff in his
words to "confront any unidentified aircraft". He assumed it was probably
coming from India. Meanwhile in Kabul, General David Petraeus, head of the
Central Command, ordered "U.S. warplanes to respond if Pakistanis scrambled
their fighter jets". It was that close. Going back to Obama, "by luck" it
didn't happen. But the risk was faced without noticeable concern, without
even reporting in fact.

Every Innocent
Killed Creates Ten New Enemies

There's a lot more to
say about that operation and its immense cost to Pakistan, but instead of
that let's look more closely at the concern for security more generally.
Beginning with security from terror, and then turning to the much more
important question of security from instant destruction by nuclear weapons.

As I mentioned, Obama's
now conducting the world's greatest international terrorist campaign - the
drones and special forces campaign. It's also a terror-generating campaign.
The common understanding at the highest level [is] that these actions
generate potential terrorists. I'll quote General Stanley McChrystal,
Petraeus' predecessor. He says that "for every innocent person you kill",
and there are plenty of them, "you create ten new enemies".

Take the marathon bombing in Boston a couple of months ago, that you all
read about. You probably didn't read about the fact that two days after the
marathon bombing there was a drone bombing in Yemen. Usually we don't happen
to hear much about drone bombings. They just go on - just straight terror
operations which the media aren't interested in because we don't care about
international terrorism as long as the victims are somebody else. But this
one we happened to know about by accident.

There was a young man from the
village that was attacked who was in the United States and he happened to
testify before Congress. He testified about it. He said that for several
years, the jihadi elements in Yemen had been trying to turn the village
against Americans, get them to hate Americans. But the villagers didn't
accept it because the only thing they knew about the United States was what
he told them. And he liked the United States. So he was telling them it was
a great place. So the jihadi efforts didn't work. Then he said one drone
attack has turned the entire village into people who hate America and want
to destroy it. They killed a man who everybody knew and they could have
easily apprehended if they'd wanted. But in our international terror
campaigns we don't worry about that and we don't worry about security.

One of the striking
examples was the invasion of Iraq. U.S. and British intelligence agencies
informed their governments that the invasion of Iraq was likely to lead to
an increase in terrorism. They didn't care. In fact, it did. Terrorism
increased by a factor of seven the first year after the Iraqi invasion,
according to government statistics. Right now the government is defending
the massive surveillance operation. That's on the front pages. The defense
is on grounds that we have to do it to apprehend terrorists.

If there were a free
press - an authentic free press - the headlines would be ridiculing this
claim on the grounds that policy is designed in such a way that it amplifies
the terrorist risk. But you can't find that, which is one of innumerable
indications of how far we are from anything that might be called a free
press.

Russian Disarmament
Offers Rejected

Let's turn to the more
serious problem: instant destruction by nuclear weapons. That's never been a
high concern for state authorities. There are many striking examples.
Actually, we know a lot about it because the United States is an unusually
free and open society and there's plenty of internal documents that are
released. So we can find out about it if we like.
Let's go back to 1950. In 1950, U.S. security was just overwhelming. There'd
never been anything like it in human history.

There was one potential
danger: ICBMs with hydrogen bomb warheads. They didn't exist, but they were
going to exist sooner or later. The Russians knew that they were way behind
in military technology. They offered the U.S. a treaty to ban the
development of ICBMs with hydrogen bomb warheads. That would have been a
terrific contribution to U.S. security. There is one major history of
nuclear weapons policy written by McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor
for Kennedy and Johnson. In his study he has a couple of casual sentences on
this. He said that he was unable to find even a staff paper discussing this.
Here's a possibility to save the country from total disaster and there
wasn't even a paper discussing it. No one cared. Forget it, we'll go on to
the important things.

A couple of years later, in 1952, Stalin made a public offer, which was
pretty remarkable, to permit unification of Germany with internationally
supervised free elections, in which the Communists would certainly lose, on
one condition - that Germany be demilitarized. That's hardly a minor issue
for the Russians. Germany alone had practically destroyed them several times
in the century. Germany militarized and part of a hostile Western alliance
is a major threat. That was the offer.

The offer was public. It
also of course would have led to an end to the official reason for NATO. It
was dismissed with ridicule. Couldn't be true. There were a few people who
took it seriously - James Warburg, a respected international commentator,
but he was just dismissed with ridicule. Today, scholars are looking back at
it, especially with the Russian archives opening up. And they're discovering
that in fact it was apparently serious. But nobody could pay attention to it
because it didn't accord with policy imperatives - vast production of threat
of war.

Let's go on a couple of
years to the late '50s, when Khrushchev took over. He realized that Russia
was way behind economically and that it could not compete with the United
States in military technology and hope to carry out economic development,
which he was hoping to do. So he offered a sharp mutual cutback in offensive
weapons. The Eisenhower administration kind of dismissed it. The Kennedy
administration listened. They considered the possibility and they rejected
it. Khrushchev went on to introduce a sharp unilateral reduction of
offensive weapons. The Kennedy administration observed that and decided to
expand offensive military capacity - not just reject it, but expand it. It
was already way ahead.

That was one reason why
Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba in 1962 to try to redress the balance
slightly. That led to what historian Arthur Schlesinger - Kennedy's advisor
- called "the most dangerous moment in world history” - the Cuban missile
crisis. Actually there was another reason for it: the Kennedy administration
was carrying out a major terrorist operation against Cuba. Massive
terrorism. It's the kind of terrorism that the West doesn't care about
because somebody else is the victim. So it didn't get reported, but it was
large-scale. Furthermore, the terror operation - it was called Operation
Mongoose - had a plan. It was to culminate in an American invasion in
October 1962. The Russians and the Cubans may not have known all the
details, but it's likely that they knew this much. That was another reason
for placing defensive missiles in Cuba.

Then came very tense
weeks as you know. They culminated on October 26th. At that time, B-52s
armed with nuclear weapons were ready to attack Moscow. The military
instructions permitted crews to launch nuclear war without central control.
It was decentralized command. Kennedy himself was leaning towards military
action to eliminate the missiles from Cuba. His own, subjective estimate of
the probability of nuclear war was between a third and a half. That would
essentially have wiped out the Northern Hemisphere, according to President
Eisenhower.

At that point, on
October 26th, the letter came from Khrushchev to Kennedy offering to end the
crisis. How? By withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba in return for
withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey. Kennedy in fact didn't even know
there were missiles in Turkey. But he was informed of that by his advisors.
One of the reasons he didn't know is that they were obsolete and they were
being withdrawn anyway. They were being replaced with far more lethal
invulnerable Polaris submarines. So that was the offer: the Russians
withdraw missiles from Cuba; the U.S. publicly withdraw obsolete missiles
that it's already withdrawing from Turkey, which of course are a much
greater threat to Russia than the missiles were in Cuba.

Kennedy refused. That's probably the most horrendous decision in human
history, in my opinion. He was taking a huge risk of destroying the world in
order to establish a principle: the principle is that we have the right to
threaten anyone with destruction anyway we like, but it's a unilateral
right. And no one may threaten us, even to try to deter a planned invasion.
Much worse than this is the lesson that has been taken away - that Kennedy
is praised for his cool courage under pressure. That's the standard version
today.

The threats continued.
Ten years later, Henry Kissinger called a nuclear alert. 1973. The purpose
was to warn the Russians not to intervene in the Israel-Arab conflict. What
had happened was that Russia and the United States had agreed to institute a
ceasefire. But Kissinger had privately informed Israel that they didn't have
to pay any attention to it; they could keep going. Kissinger didn't want the
Russians to interfere so he called a nuclear alert.

Going on ten years, Ronald Reagan's in office. His administration decided to
probe Russian defenses by simulating air and naval attacks - air attacks
into Russia and naval attacks on its border. Naturally this caused
considerable alarm in Russia, which unlike the United States is quite
vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led
to a major war scare in 1983. We have newly released archives that tell us
how dangerous it was - much more dangerous than historians had assumed.
There's a current CIA study that just came out. It's entitled "The War Scare
Was for Real". It was close to nuclear war. It concludes that U.S.
intelligence underestimated the threat of a Russian preventative strike,
nuclear strike, fearing that the U.S. was attacking them. The most recent
issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies - one of the main journals -
writes that this almost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike.
And it continues. I won't go through details, but the Bin Laden
assassination is a recent one.

They Exalted over
the Glorious Sight of Massive Floods

There are now three new
threats. I'll try to be brief, but let me mention three cases that are on
the front pages right now. North Korea, Iran, China. They're worth looking
at. North Korea has been issuing wild, dangerous threats. That's attributed
to the lunacy of their leaders. It could be argued that it's the most
dangerous, craziest government in the world, and the worst government. It's
probably true. But if we want to reduce the threats instead of march blindly
in unison, there are a few things to consider.

One of them is that the
current crisis began with U.S.-South Korean war games, which included for
the first time ever a simulation of a preemptive attack in an all-out war
scenario against North Korea. Part of these exercises were simulated nuclear
bombings on the borders of North Korea. That brings up some memories for the
North Korean leadership. For example, they can remember that 60 years ago
there was a superpower that virtually leveled the entire country and when
there was nothing left to bomb, the United States turned to bombing dams.
Some of you may recall that you could get the death penalty for that at
Nuremberg. It's a war crime.

Even if Western intellectuals and the media
choose to ignore the documents, the North Korean leadership can read public
documents, the official Air Force reports of the time, which are worth
reading. I encourage you to read them. They exulted over the glorious sight
of massive floods "that scooped clear 27 miles of valley below", devastated
75% of the controlled water supply for North Korea's rice production, sent
the commissars scurrying to the press and radio centers to blare to the
world the most severe, hate-filled harangues to come from the Communist
propaganda mill in the three years of warfare.

To the communists, the
smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief
sustenance: rice. Westerners can little conceive the awesome meaning which
the loss of this staple food commodity has for Asians: starvation and slow
death. Hence the show of rage, the flare of violent tempers and the threats
of reprisals when bombs fell on five irrigation dams. Mostly quotes. Like
other potential targets, the crazed North Korean leaders can also read
high-level documents which are public, declassified, which outline U.S.
strategic doctrine. One of the most important is a study by Clinton's
strategic command, STRATCOM. It's about the role of nuclear weapons in the
post-Cold War era.

Its central conclusions are: U.S. must retain the right
of first strike, even against non-nuclear states; furthermore, nuclear
weapons must always be available, at the ready, because they "cast a shadow
over any crisis or conflict". They frighten adversaries. So they're
constantly being used, just as if you're using a gun, going into a store
pointing a gun at the store owner. You don't fire it, but you're using the
gun. STRATCOM goes on to say planners should not be too rational in
determining what the opponent values the most. All of it has to be targeted.
“It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. That
the United States may become irrational and vindictive if its vital
interests are attacked should be part of the national persona that we
project.” It's beneficial for our strategic posture "if some elements appear
to be potentially out-of-control". That's not Richard Nixon or George W.
Bush; it's Bill Clinton.

Again, Western
intellectuals and media choose not to look, but potential targets don't have
that luxury. There's also a recent history that the North Korean leaders
know quite well. I'm not going to review it because of lack of time. But
it's very revealing. I'll just quote mainstream U.S. scholarship. North
Korea has been playing tit for tat - reciprocating whenever Washington
cooperates, retaliating whenever Washington reneges. Undoubtedly it's a
horrible place. But the record does suggest directions that would reduce the
threat of war if that were the intention, certainly not military maneuvers
and simulated nuclear bombing.

Let me turn to the "gravest threat to world peace" - those are Obama's
words, dutifully repeated in the press: Iran's nuclear program. It raises a
couple of questions: Who thinks it's the gravest threat? What is the threat?
How can you deal with it, whatever it is?
'Who thinks it's a threat?' is easy to answer. It's a Western obsession. The
U.S. and its allies say it's the gravest threat and not the rest of the
world, not the non-aligned countries, not the Arab states. The Arab
populations don't like Iran but they don't regard it as much of a threat.
They regard the U.S. as the threat. In Iraq and Egypt, for example, the U.S.
is regarded as the major threat they face. It's not hard to understand why.

What is the threat? We
know the answer from the highest level: the U.S. intelligence and the
Pentagon provide estimates to Congress every year. You can read them. The
Global Security Analysis - they of course review this. And they say the main
threat of a Iranian nuclear program - if they're developing weapons, they
don't know. But they say if they're developing weapons, they would be part
of their deterrent strategy. The U.S. can't accept that. A state that claims
the right to use force and violence anywhere and whenever it wants, cannot
accept a deterrent. So they're a threat. That's the threat.

So how do you deal with
the threat, whatever it is? Actually, there are ways. I'm short of time so I
won't go through details but there's one very striking one: We've just
passed an opportunity last December. There was to be an international
conference under the auspices of the non-proliferation treaty, UN auspices,
in Helsinki to deal with moves to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in
the Middle East. That has overwhelming international support - non-aligned
countries; it's been led by the Arab states, Egypt particularly, for
decades.

Overwhelming support. If
it could be carried forward it would certainly mitigate the threat. It might
eliminate it. Everyone was waiting to see whether Iran would agree to
attend.
In early November, Iran agreed to attend. A couple of days later, Obama
canceled the conference. No conference. The European Parliament passed a
resolution calling for it to continue. The Arab states said they were going
to proceed anyway, but it can't be done. So we have to live with the gravest
threat to world peace. And we possibly have to march on to war which in fact
is being predicted.

The population could do
something about it if they knew anything about it. But here, the free press
enters. In the United States there has literally not been a single word
about this anywhere near the mainstream. You can tell me about Europe. The last potential
confrontation is China. It's an interesting one, but time is short so I
won't go on.

Privatization Is Destroying the
Commons.

The last comment I'd
like to make goes in a somewhat different direction. I mentioned the Magna
Carta. That's the foundations of modern law. We will soon be commemorating
the 800th anniversary. We won't be celebrating it - more likely interring
what little is left of its bones after the flesh has been picked off by Bush
and Obama and their colleagues in Europe. And Europe is involved clearly.

But there is another
part of Magna Carta which has been forgotten. It had two components. The one
is the Charter of Liberties which is being dismantled. The other was called
the Charter of the Forests. That called for protection of the commons from
the depredations of authority. This is England of course. The commons were
the traditional source of sustenance, of food and fuel and welfare as well.
They were nurtured and sustained for centuries by traditional societies
collectively. They have been steadily dismantled under the capitalist
principle that everything has to be privately owned, which brought with it
the perverse doctrine of - what is called the tragedy of the commons - a
doctrine which holds that collective possessions will be despoiled so
therefore everything has to be privately owned.

The merest glance at the
world shows that the opposite is true. It's privatization that is destroying
the commons. That's why the indigenous populations of the world are in the
lead in trying to save Magna Carta from final destruction by its inheritors.
And they're joined by others. Take say the demonstrators in Gezi Park in
trying to block the bulldozers in Taksim Square. They're trying to save the
last part of the commons in Istanbul from the wrecking ball of commercial
destruction. This is a kind of a microcosm of the general defense of the
commons. It's one part of a global uprising against the violent neo-liberal
assault on the population of the world.

Europe is suffering severely from it
right now. The uprisings have registered some major successes. The most
dramatic are Latin America. In this millennium it has largely freed itself
from the lethal grip of Western domination for the first time in 500 years.
Other things are happening too. The general picture is pretty grim, I think.
But there are shafts of light. As always through history, there are two
trajectories. One leads towards oppression and destruction. The other leads
towards freedom and justice. And as always - to adapt Martin Luther King's
famous phrase - there are ways to bend the arc of the moral universe towards
justice and freedom - and by now even towards survival.

[End of presentation]

Question from conference moderator: You have been very critical of the
press. What would you like the press to do?

Chomsky: It's very
simple. I'd like the press to tell the truth about important things.